Twisted Tourniquette

For those of you joining this program already in progress, a bit of light (HA!) reading.

Memo to Ms. Bear –

If I thought that any of you were PoC-hating, pointy hat and robe-wearing white supremacists, I would not be trying to help you understand what went wrong, and I suspect that the case with many, many other people who are angry with you and your friends right now.

I do not see, quite frankly, racist and anti-racist positions in the current discourse. I see a bunch of different progressive viewpoints engaged in blowing holes in each other, and the irony of exactly when they are doing it is not wasted on me. (link)

Oh, HELL no.

You did NOT just go there. I just cannot believe you said something that utterly offensive.

This debate started a full week before January 20th. The way things are going now with people huffing and locking the door and leaving us to drop comments in a box they have no intention of opening, it will continue indefinitely.

Racism does not take a break. No, not even for Obama. It is not ‘ironic’ that racism happened today, yesterday, the day before yesterday, or the day before that, just as it will not be ‘ironic’ when it happens again tomorrow.

You know what is ironic? The fact that you basically said what countess_baltar said when
she tried to derail the topic on friendshpper’s LiveJournal.

You see, you can write what you said above about “irony,” but what I’m actually hearing as a PoC is, “People can’t complain about racism today because we’re swearing in the first black president.” Which, in my mind, sounds a lot like this:

In two hours the United States swears in President Obama, people are practically dancing in the streets, and Live Journal Fandom is on Round 5 million of “The EEE-VIL white people are OPPRESSING the ‘Other’”????

The irony in this situation is that you started out really well, but when someone asked you — because that’s what did, not dictated but ASKED — why you hadn’t stop the self-congratulatory back-patting of your followers, moved past your righteous anger, and told your friends that what they said in those specifics conversations was hurtful and ignorant. You didn’t appreciate the implication that you needed to change your behavior, and so you shut down the conversation.

What’s ironic is that your agent, probably one of the few people with as many dedicated followers as you, posted links to your post that started this debate and to Jay Lake’s white privilege denial post, in which many other white men agreed with him and posed the false binary of either making characters of color perfect or not writing them at all, and she either skimmed over the details and the comments and thought the posts looked good enough on the surface or chose to willfully ignore the controversy of their content and posted them anyway. Of course, regardless of her intentions — seeing how she is a good person the rest of time (sound familiar?) and being inclined to think it was the former – hundreds if not thousands of aspiring writers who read her blog feed will click on those links and learn a lot of misinformation.

Ironically, while there are now almost a hundred different posts up on this discussion, many of them from PoC who were hurt by the whole ‘whitewash your characters on the inside, dress them differently on the outside’ mentality and further maligned by your friends’ racist dismissals of their emotional responses, most of those readers of her blog will only read the words of well-meaning white privilege.

The irony here is that nearly every Poc who has been considerate enough to discuss this with you in a rational manner has been called any number of horrible, racist, untrue things, while you receive accolades. We’re accused of being mean, jealous haters. (PSA: WTF, amanuensis1? Racism is NOT “classy.”)

It’s also ironic that you downplay your own power and privilege and others downplay the power that Patrick Nielsen Hayden (pnh) has as an editor at Tor Publishing, or the power Macallister Stone (mac_stone) has as the manager of the enormous — and for aspiring writers, valuable — resource that is AbsoluteWrite.com and its Water Cooler Forums. You couldn’t *PAY* me to try and discuss this over there.

How many times do unpublished authors hear agents and editors warn them against “burning bridges” within the publishing community? I’ve lost count. Why is it so hard for you to imagine one of those (white) agents taking offense at criticism leveled at one of her clients because she secretly feels some responsibility for the book(s) in question?

All it takes is one. One.

One disgruntled insider takes criticism about white privilege as a personal insult, and someone’s dream, someone’s print career is *gone*, because she seems like a “grouchy person who stirs up trouble and causes bad publicity.”

Don’t think it happens? Guess what. It happened last week, Ms. Bear. Just not in your genre.

Not yet.

 

No Blog Is an Island

Your blog, your house. I get it.

You invite about 5000 people over to your house on any given day (you have a much bigger house than many others, complete with built-in auditorium and boom mics). I’m a casual acquaintance in the third row of people listening to you speak, and your good, personal friend is sitting next to me. The floor opens for comments.

The friend says something offensive. Her friends in the row behind us echo her sentiments.

I call her an asshole because what she said was offensive and wrong.

Said friend responds by PUNCHING ME IN THE FACE. In the process of winding up, she knocks over a girl who spills her popcorn and soda on another woman, and I bump into a woman in the aisle who falls and knocks out her front teeth. You see this a good ten seconds before total chaos erupts and a massive food fight ensues.

You’re saying that your response would be, “I have friends on both sides of this argument. My friends are good people. They just disagree with you, so be polite. If you ask for an apology for them being jerks and imply that I’m the only person who can retrieve those apologies, I’m kicking you out of my house.”

Really?

REALLY?

I see.

 

Friends Don’t Let Friends Be Bigots

You know, I’ve never really liked the word ‘loyalty.’ To me, it implies a person is willing to forgive all manner of sins, to toss aside morality for the sake of long-held personal relationships, to scratch an ally’s back or get a friend a job simply because they are friends and not because that friend is qualified for that job. Like ‘civility’ and ‘politeness,’ ‘loyalty’ implies an imperative of self-interest over ethics and morals and public enlightenment.

If you call someone out on their idiocy or prejudice and they reject you as a friend, it still hurts like hell to lose that friend, even if you did the right thing. I know. I understand.

I’m as fallible as the next person. I don’t know that I‘d be able to turn my brother in to the police if I doubted that he’d committed the crime he was accused of or if I didn’t think the crime warranted the punishment. I do love him with all of my heart and want him to grow as a person, become a better person. There are plenty of times we’ve butted heads and I’ve argued with him so that he knows what he’s doing is not only politically incorrect but actually hurtful to other people.

When it’s still between me and a friend and I know that an argument will be fruitless and detrimental to my overall goals of both helping that friend be a better human being and keeping that friend a friend, I may let it lie. People make mistakes. People are stupid sometimes. People change their minds occasionally without direct intervention.

But when I can see that my friend is obviously hurting other people and shows no inclination to change her behavior or apologize, I don’t let it go. I tell her in the nicest way possible, but in no uncertain terms, that she is being a jerk and is too defensive to realize that she’s wrong.
Guess which situation I think this one is?

 

Activism: Like Building Bridges Between Hearts and Minds, in a Way

This isn’t footwork. It’s not building houses in poorer neighborhoods than your own, though that is a demonstrable and worthy deed. This IS, however, the ‘transforming attitudes permanently and for the better’ part. You’re not an activist if you only act to change people’s minds when it’s comfortable for you.

There is lip-service, and then there is taking a definitive stand against the social injustices that poison us every day. There is no one-shot cure-all for the disease of prejudice. You have to inoculate yourself every day and guard against it. It is a war of constant vigilance. There will be casualties among friends, and not all wounds will heal.

Real and lasting change is not easy. Discernable progress comes only after a long, hard journey; the change usually happens with a few big leaps and a bunch of smaller steps in between.

 

If you truly want to be compassionate, go back to the beginning. Remain calm. Read. Listen. Substitute someone else’s name for yours and your friends if you have to. Listen. Think about how what you said sounded to us.

Finally — and I mean this as advice, not a dictum — please pull your head out of your ass.

 

P.S. — It’s boomstick, not “bangstick.”

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